I think the real problem with people like Tom Friedman and the rest of the "corporate center" is their disingenuousness. What they call "free trade" is really transnational state capitalism. Global corporations could not survive in a REAL free market.

For starters, there would be no patent monopolies guaranteed in international law, so TNCs couldn't control modern productive technology for its entire productive lifetime, prevent the emergence of TW competition, and permanently lock the South into providing natural resources and sweatshop labor. Not to put too fine a point on it, the people who negotiated the IP provisions of the Uruguay Round knew exactly what they were doing. It's what Orwell called "a boot stamping on a human face."

There would be no state subsidies to infrastructure like airports, highways, ports, etc., which make long-distance shipping artificially cheap and allow TNCs to externalize their distribution costs on the taxpayer. If shipping prices reflected the real cost imposed on the system, the economy would be much more decentralized, with small-scale production for local consumption.

And there would be no fraternal aid to secret police and death squads from the Green Berets and School of the Americas, to make the world safe for ITT and United Fruit. No more torture and "disappearance" of union organizers. It's amazing how well TNCs do in the kind of "free market" where the competition wind up in ditches with their faces hacked off.

In one NYT column, Friedman was more frank in admitting that the global "free market" depended on a whole statist apparatus including the U.S. military, IMF, etc. He said that the "invisible hand" depends on the "iron fist" of state power.

As a mutualist in the tradition of Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker, I believe that capitalism could not exist in a free market. It is impossible to extract a surplus from labor without state subsidies and state-guaranteed privileges. Every ruling class in history has depended on a set of laws restricting access to the means of production, in order to charge a tribute to labor.

Tom Friedman is an intellectual whore.